Co-creation - GenZ - and change as the enabler of continuity

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Millennials and GenZ are transformational generations who care about climate change, inclusion, and human rights and look for collaborative spaces and open-source frameworks to enhance their impact. In doing so, they extend their individual abilities and their collective potential.

While like-minded people tend to gather in tribes and agree on shared values and truths. The dynamic combination of truths helps the global community to solve complex wicked problems. When knowledge is not efficiently shared and doesn't inspire knowledge co-creation at scale, the community, group, company or society needs to rethink how knowledge is managed and spread.

In modern complexity, collaboration and system-level solutions pave the way to success.

Participation sums up giving and receiving, allowing individuals and communities to grow through co-creation. Open-source platforms like Ethereum (technology) or Wikipedia (content) are vivid examples of modern knowledge-sharing, inspiring knowledge co-creation.

Who buys in co-creation?

While Millennials represent the first generation embracing sharing instead of ownership, GenZ is an "open source generation" -born between the early 1990s and early 2000s - it's the first age group that never existed in a world without the web and freely available wireless networks and digital media. They take full advantage of ready-to-use self-service help and populate open source platforms for problem-solving to take pride in contributing to others and simultaneously accelerate their own success. With their participation, they are the engine of knowledge circularity. The more put knowledge into it, the more benefit from it and contribute to enhancing the wisdom of the crowd. I call it the circular economy of knowledge.

Statistics show how younger generations embrace collaborative platforms with enthusiasm. Sadly, over 40s don't and tend to perceive the term "contribution" as a time-consuming one-way track with zero benefits.

Our organizations reflect who we are | Will they survive?

Shifting from siloed closed structures to open collaborative communities, it's a Cultural Revolution that needs to happen if we want human beings and their organizations to find their way across complexity.

I profoundly believe that we – human beings – achieve our fulfilment when we feel an integral part of the universe, in other words, when we participate in the circular chain of actions and interactions that make things happen and improve human-beings happiness. Our organizations reflect who we are. In the long run, they can only survive if their engine works well.

GenX (of which I am part) - can do its part to accelerate a circular economy of knowledge to come and expand beyond boundaries. It's not about having philanthropic ambitions. It is about embracing change as the enabler of continuity.